Jamboni! Karibu/Welcome to ACK St Mary Magdalene’s Secondary School for the Deaf. We are all extremely excited to have you with us! Let us introduce ourselves; we are Team Kifaru which in Swahili means Rhino (in our opinion, the best animal of the Kenyan Big Five). We wanted a team name to reflect our strength, dedication and above all, our massive appetites for success and/or Ugali (our favourite Kenyan delicacy)! With great pleasure, meet our team which consists of two Deaf Kenyans, two hearing Kenyans and two hearing Brits; a great balance. Alex is a student at ACK St Mary Magdalene’s and is in form two, Solomon is a teaching assistant at the school, Joy and Lawrence are hearing members of the local Diocese and last but not least, Pete and Luke are volunteers from the UK.

So let us fill you in to what life is like on the Project Riandu building site through the eyes of the Rhino, Kifaru. For a start, there has been quite a significant language barrier between workers which includes Swahili, Kenyan Sign Language (KSL), Kimbere (the local mother tongue), English and of course, Rhinosaurselese. It’s been a challenge to get to grips with the languages, Lawrence “found it difficult understand the sign language and also the UK language at first” but we have all taken to immersing ourselves into these languages just like a Rhino submerging itself into a river full of swamp wildlife, feeding off each other and enjoying each others’ quirks. As Solomon puts it, “we know that we are now able to communicate and work very easily” as if one ecosystem. Life on a building site is a fantastic opportunity to quickly pick up these different languages and to get used to different cultures as words are applied to very visual situations, and because it’s important to understand and communicate different tasks within a build team. For the first few days, Team Kifaru were in charge of all things bricks.

Watering, moving, stacking, laying, dropping, breaking, re-stacking and bit more moving; you name it, we did it. The bricks being prepared for the brand new dormitory and dining hall, are all hand made on site from the soil dug up from the building’s foundations and not even using any electricity, just good, old fashioned Rhino strength! It is pretty tiring work despite sounding so wonderfully efficient. The Rhino arises and is ready to start work at 9am and hangs up his horn for the day at 5pm. But usually half of the team then go on a run around Riandu to get hot before the cold shower that removes excess soil and cement as the sun goes down. Supper is served at around 7.30 and after that we meet with other volunteers to socialise, learn more sign language and play games. By the time the Rhino pulls his blanket over himself he’s quite exhausted.

Life on site isn’t always the glamour of laying bricks unfortunately, as one may imagine when they imagine builders at work, we soon all begin to learn that a building site is mainly just moving this around, be it sand, cement, huge stones, compliments, metalwork, tools, it’s one massive conveyer belt but that suits us Rhino’s down to a tee.After moving some things to some places, we soon returned to our natural habitat however; bricks. An important task left over from last year is to complete the high level walling around the bathrooms in the first dormitory. Once again, the Rhinos prove their versatility whilst working strongly as a team to continue with the brick laying and making shuttering and concreting for capping beams, that will carry another layer of smaller bricks at a higher height, for structural security. As Pete puts it, “even despite only knowing a little of the language it did not hinder our ability to work together well as a team and we very quickly got to know each other and work well together.”

That’s all folks! Rhino signing out. I hope you enjoyed reading about a Rhino’s life on the Project Riandu building site as much as we enjoyed sharing it with you! So until next time, safari njema (safe journey)!